A User Study on How to Render Criticality in Interfaces that Visualize Process Maps

This paper addresses the main shortcoming that was reported by the users of ProDoc, an electronic document system that we developed to enable users to navigate electronic documents according to predefined process maps: how to render criticality. Criticality is a dimension that pertains to process modeling and for which a graphical way to represent it in flowcharts and process modeling notations does not exist. We report a questionnaire-based empirical user study where we sound out respondents of heterogeneous expertise and attitude on the importance of representing this dimension, as well as on the efficacy of some graphical solutions to integrate it in flowcharts representing work processes. The results we obtained are statistically significant: they show that current notations are inadequate and that a solution to convey flow criticality exists and can be used in software applications that visualize processes